The Influence of the Bible on Civilisation Part 5

It was Johann Gutenberg, a native of Mainz, residing some time at Stra.s.sburg as a silversmith, then again returning to Mainz, who made the great discovery that several copies could be printed at once by using letters cut out of wood or metal. People had used woodcuts before his time. Engraving large blocks of wood with pictures and letters, they printed the so-called block-books, as a cheap subst.i.tute for illuminated ma.n.u.scripts. Gutenberg's great idea was that instead of using a woodcut block for the page one might compose a page by using separate, movable letters, putting them together according to the present need, then separating them and using them again. We are not interested here in the technical part of the work; imperfect as it was, it was surely a great advance. Now one got a hundred copies, two hundred, or even more without any difference between them. When the proofs had been corrected carefully the Bible was sure to have as few mistakes as possible; and if the printer still found some errors, he could easily correct them for the whole edition by adding a printed list of errata, or necessary corrections, at the end of the volume. It was only by printing that uniformity of text became possible.

The important fact for our present investigation is that it was the Bible which Gutenberg chose to be the first printed book. This fact ill.u.s.trates the estimation in which the Bible was held. It shows at the same time the demand for Bible copies; the printer felt sure that it would sell and pay. It was an enormous enterprise to put the fresh, inexperienced art of printing straightway at a task so big as this. It took four years to print the first Bible, from 1453 to 1456. While working at it Gutenberg had to try some smaller things which would bring him money immediately, school-books, letters of indulgence, and so on, but his main care was given to the Bible. It contained six hundred and forty-one leaves, with two columns on each page, and forty-two lines in each column (Plate XV). The initials were not printed, but were supposed to be illuminated by hand; a small letter was printed in the free s.p.a.ce to indicate what kind of letter the illuminator had to paint. Probably not more than one hundred copies were printed, a third part of them on parchment. Out of the thirty-one copies which have been preserved, or, to speak more accurately, are known as such, ten are luxuriously printed on parchment and illuminated, each in a different way, but all very fine and costly. It is obvious that Gutenberg put into this printing not only a great amount of labour but much money, too; and there was no a.s.surance that it would come in again in a short time. Like many ingenious discoverers and inventors, he was no business man; he was always in need of money. So when his first Bible was not yet finished one of his creditors, John Fust, of Mainz, took all his apparatus from him and, a.s.sociating himself with an apprentice of Gutenberg's, Peter Schoffer by name, brought the printing of the first Bible to completion, thus depriving the inventor of the financial success as well as of the glory.

But Gutenberg was not discouraged. He immediately began, with a new set of letters, the printing of a second Bible, containing thirty-six lines in each column and so amounting to eight hundred and eighty-one leaves in size. He printed it in the years 1456 to 1458. Again his rivals, Fust and Schoffer, published, in 1462, a third Bible, called sometimes the Bible of Mainz. It has forty-eight lines in each column.

Thus the printing of the Bible was inaugurated. The new art quickly spread all over Germany, and printing-presses were established at Stra.s.sburg, Bamberg, Nuremberg, Basel, Cologne, Lubeck, and many other places. The art entered France and England with less success, the government in both countries being partly opposed to it and partly trying to make it a royal privilege. Good printers worked at Paris and Lyons. The most splendid presses were at Venice, where the Doge championed the new art even against attacks from Rome. Before the year 1500 ninety-two editions of the Latin Bible were issued by these various presses, according to Mr. Copinger, who possessed the largest collection of printed Bibles. (He registers four hundred and thirty-eight editions of the Latin Bible during the sixteenth century.) In addition to these we have a great number of printed Bibles in the vernacular of Germany, France, Italy, Bohemia, and so on. There was a sudden outpouring of Bibles. But we must not overestimate the circulation. These editions contained scarcely more than two hundred copies each; they were most of them in large folio, very unwieldy, and the price was enormous, though, of course, not so high as it is now, when for one copy of Gutenberg's first Bible $20,000 is paid. The Bible was not available for the average man. We know of scholars copying for themselves the Bible or the New Testament from a printed Bible. The clergy were rather opposed to this printing. They did not in the least encourage the printers; on the contrary, they tried to cause as many difficulties as possible.

Therefore the circulation was a limited one. Copies were bought by churches for their services, by princes, and by very rich merchants, as to-day a splendid work is bought more as a luxury than as something for daily use. One cannot say that at this period the Bible, even by printing, acquired a circulation among the people.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE XV--GUTENBERG'S FIRST BIBLE

(42 lines, Mainz, 1453-1456)

Copy at Leipzig, on parchment, beautifully illuminated. The capitals are painted by hand, but indicated by small printed letters.

From "Erfindung der Buchdruckerkunst." Published by Velhagen & Klasing, Bielefeld, Germany.]

This was accomplished only through the Reformation. It was Luther's German translation which made the printed Bible popular and caused a number of similar translations. In order to make the Bible what it was destined to be, the book of the people, the printer and the translator had to work together.

In former times many Protestants held the view that Luther rediscovered the Bible, which had been almost entirely forgotten. They thought that there had been a meagre transmission of the Bible and no translation into the vernacular at all. This view, of course, is untenable. We have seen what a circulation the Bible had in the last century before the Reformation, and that it had been translated into almost every vernacular. Nevertheless, Luther's version is a landmark in the history of translation; it marks a new period and represents the beginning of a new sort of translation.

In order to realise this, let us look back over the former history of translations. In the first period we found the Bible translated from the Greek into Latin, Syriac, Coptic; in the next period Gothic, Armenian, Georgian, Libyan, and Ethiopic were added, not to mention the several revisions of the former translations. About 600 A. D. the Bible was known in eight languages; in each of them there had been several attempts at translating. There were different dialects, too; in Coptic no less than five. The spread of Christianity in the next period is shown by the fact that the Bible is translated--and this again several times--into Arabic and Slavonic from the Greek, and into German, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and French from the Latin--rather, I should say, parts of the Bible, for it was only parts which people at this period tried to translate. We hear of a Gospel, of a Psalter, of one or another book translated into the vernacular. Only when stimulated by the popular movements of the next period, as we have seen in the fifth chapter, was the work of translating into the vernacular prosecuted on a larger scale; from the thirteenth century on we may speak of Bibles in the vernacular. Beginning in the southeast of France, the tendency spread over Italy and Germany. We can still trace the influence of the French Waldensian Bible in the earliest Italian translations and also in some of the German ones. Another circle is defined by the northern French translation, which influenced the Flemish and Dutch and possibly even the Scandinavian. All these are based not so much upon the Bible itself as on a rearrangement known as the Historical Bible, telling the stories and omitting the doctrinal portions. A new start was made in England by Wycliffe, and this caused the Bohemian translation into Czech, which was again influenced by the Waldensian Bible. It is like a net thrown all over Europe. We may count more than a dozen languages, many of them represented by different dialects and by several separate renditions, which were added to the eight languages of the former periods. The culmination came in the fifteenth century, when everywhere fresh translations were attempted. In Germany more than forty different types of translation can be counted, and one of them, containing the whole Bible, was printed fourteen times before the period of the Reformation (Plate XVI). There was only one translation, however, with a value of its own, and that was the Spanish, for this was made from the Hebrew Old Testament by the help of some Spanish Jews. Both the king of Spain and the high clergy showed at that time a remarkable breadth of view in trying to get a trustworthy translation. All other versions in the West were based upon the Latin Vulgate as the recognised Bible of the church, and they were made with more devotion than knowledge. The translators usually did not know Latin well nor were they masters of their own language. They translated word for word, and the result was sometimes strange. It is of no great importance that, not recognising in "Tertius"

and "Quartus" proper names, one of these translators said "the third"

and "the fourth." It was worse when another explained "encaenia" in John 10 : 22, the feast of dedication, as meaning "wedding," or declared the words in Matt. 27 : 46, "Eli, Eli," to be Greek. Sometimes the translation resulted in pure nonsense, and even where it made sense, it was difficult and often far from the true meaning. Now humanism insisted upon going back to the original languages. Erasmus, in 1516, published the first edition of the New Testament in Greek. We see how Luther, at this time professor at the University of Wittenberg, lecturing upon Romans when this edition came into his hands, was impressed by this new source of information. He eagerly set himself to learn Greek with the help of his friend Melanchthon, and so he was prepared for the great task of translating the New Testament directly out of the Greek into German. It was during his exile in the Wartburg that he found the necessary time to make this translation. It appeared in print in September, 1522, and it is astonis.h.i.+ng in how short a time this New Testament circulated all through Germany. It was reprinted everywhere, and often very carelessly, so that Luther had to complain against the printers as falsifying his translation. He himself did not take any payment for his work; he wanted the publishers to sell it as cheaply as possible. And it was a masterpiece, not only for the beauty of the language, which was the best and most popular German that had ever been written but also in the way Luther translated, giving not the single words but the meaning of the sentences, not transferring from one vocabulary to the other but trans.m.u.ting (if one may say so) the whole expression of thought from Greek into German. The Bible became a German book; one hardly feels that he is reading a translation. Luther had more trouble with the Old Testament. In order to master the Hebrew he had to rely on friends; he even asked some Jewish rabbis to join their meetings. He tells us that they often had to look for a single word three or four weeks; that in particular Job was so difficult that they scarcely finished three lines in four days. The Pentateuch was ready in the year 1523; then year after year the work went on. The prophets were not finished until 1532, and in 1534 the first complete Bible was issued. The work was highly praised by Luther's friends and unduly criticised by his antagonists. He himself replied sharply to such criticism, and he had a right to do so because the attempts made by Eck and Emser, the champions of Roman Catholicism, to translate the Bible themselves were feeble and betrayed much dependence on Luther's translation, which they had so severely criticised. Luther himself never felt satisfied with his own work and always tried to improve it. At two different periods he held meetings with his friends for the purpose of revising the Bible. The records of these meetings of the committee for the revision of the Bible (if one may call it so) have come down to us, and it is highly interesting to see how carefully they discussed every word and how it is always Luther himself who at last finds the most apt expression.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE XVI--FIRST GERMAN BIBLE

Printed at Stra.s.sburg by G. Mentell in 1466: the progress in printing made in these ten years is remarkable.

Entnommen aus W. Walthers "Deutsche Bibelubersetzung des Mittelalters." Verlag von h.e.l.lmuth Wollermann in Braunschweig.]

It is a great privilege of the German nation that it received this excellent Bible at the very beginning of the new era. The German language is moulded by this Bible. In Luther's time the dialects still prevailed. Luther's Bible had to be translated into the dialect of lower Germany. The south of Germany and Switzerland had quite another dialect.

The Zurich reformers, in 1529, published a Bible in this dialect, translating from Luther's Bible as far as it existed at this time and providing for the rest a translation of their own. It is unquestionably due to Luther's Bible that the Germans have now one language for all literary purposes. The German cla.s.sic writers Herder, Wieland, Klopstock, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe were all trained from their childhood by the language of this Bible. Even now there is a remarkable difference in style between authors of Protestant and of Roman Catholic origin in Germany. In the easy and fluent language of the former we see the influence of Luther and Goethe, whereas the latter often show a certain stiffness and a greater number of provincialisms. The attempts to translate the Bible independently of Luther have never succeeded in gaining any large circulation, although there have been many such, not only from the Roman Catholic side but also from Protestants. A famous one is the so-called Berleburg Bible, by certain mystics, published in 1726-42 in eight volumes. In the nineteenth century scholars undertook to give more scientific and more exact translations, but, valuable as these may be for scholarly purposes, the German people will never abandon its cla.s.sic Bible. It is difficult even to introduce a revision.

There was a revision some twenty years ago, but in this Luther's text was retouched and altered only at a very few points, most of the corrections introduced by the revision committee being rather rest.i.tutions of Luther's original renderings, which had been badly "improved" by former printers. It is remarkable that even the printed Bible never stands still, but is always changing, the printers acting as the copyists did in former times. The copies of the revised text printed at Stuttgart differ slightly from the copies printed at Halle and Berlin, to mention three of the modern centres of German Bible printing.

Luther's translation was the signal for a general movement in this direction. It is not so much translating the Bible into new languages--only a few which had no Bible before were added to the list given above--as rather the making of new translations in all languages of the Christian world as far as this was influenced by the Reformation.

Of course some of these translations were inspired by humanism more than by the spirit of the Reformation. The humanists abhorred the vulgarity of the monkish Latin, and they extended their aversion to the official Bible of the church, the Vulgate of Saint Jerome; therefore they tried to translate the Bible into what they thought to be Ciceronian Latin, and some of them translated this again into French or German. But most of the translators were simply following Luther's model; nay, they used Luther's translation even more than the original. King Christian III of Denmark gave orders that the translators should follow Luther's version as closely as possible. In this way the Dutch, the Danish, the Swedish, the Finnish, the Lettish, and the Lithuanian Bibles were more or less influenced by or even based upon Luther's.

It is different with the English and the French Bible. Wycliffe's translation never had been printed. William Tindale, a pupil of Erasmus, translated the New Testament and parts of the Old during his exile in Germany and Holland, whither he had gone under Henry VIII because, as he says, there was no place to translate the New Testament in all England.

Printed copies of them were brought to England, but most of them were confiscated and destroyed. Once again the Bible was burned, but this time by the Christian king in agreement with the bishops of the English church; and with the Bible suffered many of its zealous readers. Tindale himself died a martyr for his faith and his Bible in October, 1536, at the hands of the imperial authorities in Flanders. But the work of Bible translation went on, nevertheless, and Henry VIII was still on the throne when the Bible gained the victory. Miles Coverdale, who had undertaken another translation, issued the year before Tindale's death, failed to get royal sanction for its publication, but the book was not suppressed. John Rogers, a friend of Tindale's, the year after his death, under the a.s.sumed name of Thomas Matthew, published a Bible, chiefly made up from Tindale's and Coverdale's work. Through Crumwell's mediation Cranmer secured the king's permission to sell this Bible in the realm. But the convocation was not satisfied with it. It asked for another translation, and therefore the so-called Great Bible was published in 1539, Coverdale revising his former work under the direction of Crumwell, Cranmer, and others. This Great Bible was ordered by a royal warrant to be exhibited in all parish churches; copies were fastened to the pulpits by means of chains, and the public was allowed to read them "with discretion, honest intent, charity, reverence, quiet behavior," as is said in the admonition published by Bishop Bonner. This happened in the last years of Henry VIII. Under Queen Mary--b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, as she was called--the printing of Bibles was stopped, but the exiles who went to Geneva undertook a new revision, which was much more radical and had the privilege of bearing an introductory letter by Calvin himself. At the very moment of Queen Elizabeth's coronation, among other prisoners (according to the expression of one of her courtiers) the four evangelists and Saint Paul were released, having been long shut up in an unknown tongue, as it were in prison. The Great Bible was revised by some of the bishops under direction of Archbishop Parker, who did not shrink from using improvements from the Geneva Bible. This Bishops'

Bible, published in 1568, was the official one, but the Geneva Bible was far more popular, while the Roman Catholics made a translation of their own, printed in France at Rheims and Douai. The rivalry between the Bishops' Bible and the Geneva Bible was confusing. Therefore, in order to overcome it, King James, in 1604, appointed a committee for the revision of the Bible, consisting of about fifty members, and divided into six groups, two of which met at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge respectively. They did excellent work, the result of which was published in 1611 and is known as the Authorised Version. It is in this version that the English translation attained its highest excellence. It is this form which gained the largest circulation and the greatest popularity among all English-speaking peoples. It still survives the recent attempt at revision, which was made by an English and an American committee, both working on the same principles and in constant communication with one another. It is a well-known fact that the final corrections were cabled from England to America in order to procure a simultaneous publication on both sides of the Atlantic. Here again, as in the German revision, the two issues are not identical. It marks, however, a clear distinction between the German and the English Bible that the former reached its final form at its very beginning, whereas the latter did not achieve this result until a hundred years later. The Bible of Luther was creative of the German language, as we have seen, while the English Bible is rather a product of the period of highest literary culture in England. Luther produced Goethe. Shakespeare (d. April 23, 1616) is practically contemporaneous with the Authorised Version.

The development of the French Bible is still more slow and varied. There was a pre-Reformation translation, printed several times, at Lyons and at Paris; but it was of a purely mediaeval character. Then a humanist, Jacques Lefevres d'etaples (Faber Stapulensis, d. 1536), undertook a new French translation from the Vulgate. The first French Bible translated from the original Hebrew and Greek was published in 1535 by Peter Robert Olivetan, a cousin of Calvin. The author himself, and Calvin, and others corrected and improved it from time to time, and nearly every twenty or thirty years a new editor would try to revise it. In this series of revisions one of the most successful was that of Frederic Ostervald of Neuchatel, in 1744. But the process is still going on, French and Swiss theologians vying one with another in fair compet.i.tion. Moreover, the Protestant translation found many rivals in the work of Roman Catholics, especially in the great period of French literature in the reign of Louis XIV. Some of these translators, for example Bossuet, aimed at making the style of their translation as elegant as possible, while others, under the influence of Port Royal, paraphrased the text with a view rather to clearness. None of these versions had real success; none has become final. France still suffers from the lack of a cla.s.sic form for its Bible.

The att.i.tude of a nation toward its Bible is largely determined by the development of the translation. It is obvious that the Germans hold to Luther's Bible even more insistently than the English do to their Authorised Version, and that in France there is an open field for every fresh attempt at revising and translating. The nation has not become united with its Bible, and, as regards language, the famous "Dictionnaire de l'Academie," aiming at a standard of literary uniformity, is but a poor and artificial subst.i.tute for the influence exercised in a living and natural way by the Bible.

It is not our task here to trace the history of translations in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, and elsewhere. It is to a large extent a history of enthusiasm, devotion, and martyrdom, and at the same time of failure and oppression. Wherever the so-called Counter-Reformation, started by the Jesuits, gained hold of the people, the vernacular was suppressed and the Bible kept from the laity. So eager were the Jesuits to destroy the authority of the Bible--the paper pope of the Protestants, as they contemptuously called it--that they even did not refrain from criticising its genuineness and historical value.

To sum up: it was the Bible which trained printers and translators and thereby made a n.o.ble contribution to modern civilisation and literature; on the other hand, it was printing and translating which made it possible for the Bible to become the popular book that ruled daily life.

VII

THE BIBLE RULES DAILY LIFE (1550-1850)

The Reformation gave the Bible a new position--not that there had been no Bible before, nor that the Bible had had no influence. We have seen that there were numbers of Bibles, in Latin as well as in the vernacular, and that the Bible had been one of the foundations of mediaeval civilisation, yet it was only by Luther's translation and the other versions made on his model that the Bible became a really popular book, and it was only by the Reformation that the Bible was established as the authority for daily life in a modern, that is, non-ascetic, sense.

The two points insisted on by all the reformers were, first, that the Bible is perspicuous, that is, that every reader can by himself find out in his Bible what is essential for salvation; and, secondly, that the Bible is sufficient. The Christian does not need anything else; the Bible tells him everything which he requires--of course in its own domain, religion, or, to use the language of that time, the "doctrine of salvation." By the Reformation the Bible got rid of all its rivals, such as tradition, Apocrypha, legend, canon law, and so on. It is wonderful to see--and I doubt if modern Christianity has realised the fact in all its importance--how by the preaching of the reformers all these things, which hitherto had been thought of as integral parts of Christianity, simply fell away. No cult of the saints, no adoration of their images, no legends, no fancy, no merriment connected with religion, but the pure Bible and the stern doctrine of it and the austere att.i.tude of Puritanism corresponding to it were now uppermost.

Nay, the letter of the Bible was binding in a stricter sense than it had ever been before. Catholicism made it possible to mitigate the strictness by allegorical interpretation; Protestantism insisted upon taking the Bible in its literal sense. There was now no way of escape; a man had to take whatever the Bible said or refuse the Bible altogether.

In principle the mystery had gone; the Bible was plain and made itself understood.

It was the literal sense, as established by lexicon and grammar, which was to be followed. This caused the reformers to encourage and facilitate the study of the original languages of the Bible. When they tried to improve the grammar-schools and to found as many new ones as possible, it was not so much the humanistic delight in the cla.s.sical languages as the desire to secure a sure knowledge of Greek and Hebrew which might enable a boy to read and to interpret the Bible. It is evident from many utterances both of Luther and Calvin that their aim in all their school work was to provide good preachers of the true gospel, or good teachers of the genuine doctrine of the Bible.

To be sure, there are differences of character, both personal and national, between the two great reformers, which account for a somewhat different development of their churches. In Luther's piety the joyful experience of salvation brings in a happy note; the children of G.o.d praise his love and grace. In Calvin's devotion the feeling prevails that G.o.d's majesty is above all creatures and that his holy will is the supreme rule for our life. Religion with Luther is bright and cheerful, whereas with Calvin it has a darker tinge. But both are building on the same foundation and with the same end in view: from salvation to salvation, from grace to grace. The difference is but one of att.i.tude toward the present life.

The difference finds its best expression in a varying use of the phrase Word of G.o.d. Both, of course, believed in an historical revelation of G.o.d to mankind, and they were convinced that this revelation was to be found in the holy Scriptures. G.o.d had spoken through his prophets; he had given his promises to his people; he had sent his Son and had fulfilled his promises through him. All this was to be found in the Bible and only in the Bible. The reformers refused the authority of tradition, just as they declined to acknowledge the present individual inspiration of enthusiasts, or "Schwarmgeister," as Luther contemptuously called them. It was in the Bible that Christianity had to look for all necessary information about G.o.d and salvation. And yet Luther, when using the expression Word of G.o.d, scarcely thinks of the written book. It is the living word as represented by the preaching of the prophets and the apostles, and perpetuated by the preaching of the ministers of the church. It is to him not a formal authority but an energising inspiration. Not everything in the Bible is authoritative, merely by the fact that it stands in the Bible; only what witnesses to Christ is authoritative and is to be taken as the Word of G.o.d. On the other hand, Zwingli and Calvin frequently use the term Word of G.o.d when speaking of the holy Scriptures themselves. It is characteristic that the reformed churches of Switzerland felt it their duty to fix the exact number of writings included in this Word of G.o.d, just as the Roman Catholic church did at the Council of Trent, while no Lutheran creed ever defines the exact content of the Bible. To the former it was a book of law, to the latter a book of inspiration.

Luther, owing to his familiarity with Saint Paul, understood that Christianity had nothing to do with the Law; the whole notion of the Law had to be dropped out from the field of religion. Law there must be in the government of the state--it would not be necessary even there, if all people were true Christians--but for the wicked there must be a law and there must be punishment. The Christian's life, however, is not a slave's obedience to injunctions but a child's glad doing of his father's will; he knows what his father wants him to do and he does it joyfully. Luther is especially interested in proving that Jesus'

teaching, in particular the Sermon on the Mount, does not exhibit an ascetic law, but gives principles for the moral life of every Christian.

One need not enter a monastery in order to fulfil Christ's commandments.

It is in the tasks of the daily life that a Christian has to prove himself a true disciple of Jesus. The Bible is to rule the daily life of the Christian, but not in the sense of a law. When, in 1523, a preacher at Weimar aimed to introduce the Mosaic law instead of the common law, Luther treated him as a "Schwarmgeist," and, in fact, it was that proposal which lay at the basis of all the "Schwarmgeisterei." Such experiments, aiming to const.i.tute a kingdom of the Saints on earth, as the Anabaptists made at Munster and elsewhere, always failed, and made Luther and his friends suspicious of any such attempt.

It is different with Calvin. He is interested in realising the kingdom of G.o.d in the Christian congregation, or, to put it more accurately, in the commonwealth of Geneva, which is to him identical with the Christian congregation of that place. So it is the commonwealth which is to be ruled by the Bible, and the Bible in this role acts as a law to which the whole community as well as the individual has to submit. And again it is characteristic that Calvin takes the Bible as a unit. It is the Old Testament law as well as the gospel which is to be regarded as the indispensable rule both of public and private life. With the Calvinists the ten commandments become an integral part of the regular Sunday service.

Of course there are many gradations between these two positions.

Zwingli, the Zurich reformer, was of a different type from Calvin, while he was even more opposed to Luther than was the Genevan. Luther's rule was to abolish whatsoever was contrary to the Bible. Zwingli would permit only what was based upon or commanded by the Bible; he objected to the use of an organ, to the keeping of festival days except Sunday, and so on. Luther even tolerated pictures in the church. He was sure that no one would adore them if pervaded by the true spirit of the gospel, and he was convinced that this spirit could be successfully inculcated by means of preaching. Zwingli and Calvin both did away with all pictures in the churches. They had the walls whitewashed and the ten commandments and other pa.s.sages from the Bible painted on them. Nothing is so characteristic of this difference between the Lutheran and the Calvinistic feeling as the history of an epitaph in an East Prussian church, the monument of the n.o.ble family of the earls of Dohna. At the time of the Reformation they joined the Grand Master, later Duke, Albrecht of Brandenburg in taking Luther's part. The epitaph, which was erected in the church of Mohrungen on the death of Earl Peter in 1553, was decorated with a picture showing the holy Trinity adored by the family of the donor. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the family went over to Calvinism, and the painting was altered by covering the image of the holy Trinity with black varnish and putting over it some Bible verses in gold letters.

The different att.i.tude toward the Bible finds its expression also in the fact that the Lutherans used hymns, whereas the Calvinists adhered to the Biblical Psalter. Of course the vigorous songs composed by Luther are most of them based upon Psalms and other Biblical pa.s.sages, and so were the greater number of hymns in the Lutheran church. On the other hand, the Calvinists did not agree with the English church in taking over the alternative recitation of the Psalter from the mediaeval exercises of the monasteries and large cathedral choirs. They used the Psalter in a rhythmical paraphrase adapted to modern singing, but keeping so near to the wording of the Psalms that they even called it the Psalm-book. The difference was, in fact, slight, but they felt it to be essential. The Lutherans followed the usage of the church, the Calvinists the very word of the Bible. It is remarkable, however, that hymns gradually gained more importance among the Calvinists, especially since the time of the eighteenth-century revivals, and that nowadays the hymn-book, enriched by the contributions of recent time from poets of all denominations, is in favour with all Protestants and in some circles is even in danger of becoming a subst.i.tute for the Bible.

In spite of all these differences, these two great forms of Protestantism manifest almost the same att.i.tude toward the Bible, and we see them changing their att.i.tude almost at the same time and in the same direction. The theologians of the orthodox period exaggerated the authority of the Bible to such an extent that critics like Lessing could speak of Bibliolatry or Bible-wors.h.i.+p. They extended the notion of inspiration even to the smallest details in the printed text which lay before them, with no regard for the fact that those details were late additions, sometimes even misprints, and that the various editions did not agree in these details. True scholastics as they were, they had no sense for facts but an unlimited desire for theory; the facts had to submit to the theory, and whoever would appeal to the facts against the theory was denounced as a heretic and driven out as a disreputable person. This doctrinal att.i.tude changed when, at the end of the seventeenth century, Pietism in Germany and Methodism in England once again turned religion from ecclesiastical doctrine to personal devotion.

The estimation of the Bible is not diminished--quite the contrary; yet it finds its expression not in stiff formulas of dogmatics but in beautiful hymns. Under the direction of P. J. Spener (d. 1705) people once more gather in private circles to read and to interpret the Bible; once more the students are drawn away from dead scholasticism to the living study of the Bible. To the _theologia dogmatica_ is opposed a _theologia biblica_. People begin to realise again what is the true use of the Bible, not as a text-book for dogmatic compet.i.tions and controversies, but as the divine word of comfort and exhortation, a guide to salvation, and an expression of salvation already gained. There is a beautiful tract written by A. H. Francke of Halle (d. 1727) and very often printed as a preface to the Bible in German, "A brief direction how to read the Bible for edification." It sounds thoroughly modern, as it deals not with questions of theology but entirely with piety. This att.i.tude was again changed by the so-called rationalism.

That movement, too, entered the Protestantism of Germany as well as of England and America in various forms and under various names (deism, unitarianism), but with the same tendency. It may be that it had an easier start and a wider spread in the Lutheran church of Germany. We shall speak of its influence in the next chapter. The Bible was submitted to reason or explained according to reason. The Bible was to be followed for the sake of the precepts of reason contained in it or else not at all. It was, however, the common conviction that the Bible gave the most reasonable injunctions, and whereas orthodoxy had been mostly intellectual and Pietism emotional, rationalism by its moral strictness helped the Bible to retain its influence on daily life.

This influence was due to the fact that since Luther's time the Bible was in every house; it was the centre of the regular morning and evening prayers, the father reading and explaining to his family some chapters of the Bible. What a knowledge of the Bible had been gained by the laity soon after the Reformation is shown by the prince elector of Saxony Johann Friedrich, who at the important meetings held at Augsburg in 1530 was able to quote from memory all necessary pa.s.sages of the Bible.

In Lutheran countries the influence of the Bible found expression in arts and crafts. Not only were the walls of the churches decorated with pictures taken from the Bible but also the walls of private houses. The furniture of a farmhouse was painted with Biblical stories, very awkward paintings, indeed, but showing the spirit of simple and plain devotion.

It is otherwise when a rich lady's dressing-table in baroque or rococo is decorated with such scenes. We feel that they are out of place there and that scenes taken from ancient mythology would suit such a purpose much better. We should consider it a little profane that, at a wedding dinner in the sixteenth century, between the several courses elaborate dishes were pa.s.sed, representing Biblical scenes. We cannot help remembering the remark of that preacher of the old church who exclaimed: "Oh, that they had these stories painted in their hearts!"

Much more important is the art of music. Luther was fond of it; he would never have given up a choir and an organ. He made it possible for the Lutheran church to produce the greatest masterpieces that music has ever achieved--Bach's oratorios. While the Roman church directed the work of its great musicians toward the glorification of the ma.s.s, and the Calvinistic church became rigorously opposed to the very art of music, the Lutheran composers were inspired by the Bible itself. The Biblical sonatas of Johann Kuhnau (d. 1722) seem to us mere trifling. The real work was done by Heinrich Schutz (d. 1672) and Johann Sebastian Bach, the cantor of Saint Thomas in Leipzig (d. 1750), who succeeded in giving to the Bible a new voice, a voice which is still sounding and entering circles where the printed Bible would scarcely be read. The combination in Bach's oratorios is very striking--the majestic church hymns sung by the choir, the simple recitative of Scripture, and, last but not least, the arias giving the response of the pious individual to the words of G.o.d in the Bible. This is the most characteristic part of it. Protestant piety cannot be without the personal expression of individual feeling; it is thoroughly subjective in the highest sense. As Luther in his catechism explains the Apostles' Creed thus, "I believe that G.o.d has created me...; I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord, who has saved me...; I believe that it is impossible for me to come to Jesus Christ without the help of the Holy Ghost...," so Protestant piety gives to everything this subjective note. There is a Greek ma.n.u.script of the Gospels from the fourteenth century, written in several colours to distinguish the words of Jesus, of his apostles, of his enemies, and of the evangelist. The narrative of the evangelist is given in green ink, the words of the Pharisees and other adversaries of Jesus in black, the words of the disciples in blue, and the sayings of Jesus himself are in red. It is a curious piece of work, showing the tendency of the Greek church to dramatise the sacred history of the Gospel. With this Greek copy we may compare a Protestant family Bible mentioned by a modern German preacher. It is a plain old printed Bible, but the pious great-grandfather has marked it all through with various colours, which he explains in a note: "What touched the sin of my heart:--Black. What inspired me to good:--Blue. What comforted me in sorrow:--Red. What promised me the grace of G.o.d in eternity:--Gold." The difference between objective facts and subjective relation to them, between apprehension and appreciation, is evident. This is the new spirit which pervades the Protestant reader of the Bible, and therefore the Bible is much more to him than it had been to Christianity in former times.

Where the Bible was read in such a spirit it was bound to gain an influence upon the daily life. We must admit this even if we have no direct evidence. The inward acting of the spirit in the individual is inaccessible to scientific observation and statistics.

We are in a much better position regarding the Calvinistic circles, for here the influence of the Bible was a public one. The Bible here was recognised as the only rule to be followed in public life as well as in private. The most characteristic feature is the att.i.tude toward the Sabbath. Luther had explained the third commandment (according to his numeration, the fourth according to the Calvinists) as meaning "den Feiertag heiligen," to use the day, granted by G.o.d as a holiday, for going to church and listening to the preaching of the gospel; so the Lutherans, who never called it Sabbath, did not insist upon avoiding all work, but upon attending the holy service; besides, human feeling led them to relieve their servants and employees so far as possible from their labour. The Calvinists kept the Sabbath, as they said, exactly according to the Old Testament commandment: "Thou shalt not do any work." It reminds us sometimes of the minuteness of rabbinical Sabbath controversies when we see how carefully the Sabbath is kept as a day for doing no work whatever; even the children are forbidden to play with their toys. It is a concession made to the gospel if works of piety, of charity, or of necessity are permitted.

Another prominent feature is the use of Biblical names. Among Lutherans and members of the English church the use of Christian names, mostly derived from famous saints or kings, as Edward, George, Richard, Robert, Thomas, William, continued; while the Calvinists preferred Biblical names such as Abraham, Isaac, Moses, Joshua, Elijah, Jeremiah, Nathaniel. They often chose the names of obscure persons from the Bible, such as Abia, Abiel, Ammi, Eliphalet, Jared, Jedidiah, Jerathmeel, Reuben, Uriah. It was not so much the admiration for this or that hero in the Bible as the simple demand for something Biblical which gave to the children such unfamiliar names. Parents did not care for the real character of the man to whom the name first belonged provided he was mentioned in the Bible; neither Delilah nor Archelaus had a reputation which would make their names desirable; but, nevertheless, they were given. Gamaliel was a Pharisee, a scribe, very far from being a Christian, but the name, being in the Bible, became a Christian name among the descendants of one of the Pilgrim fathers. Biblical reminiscences also are to be found in Christian names, such as Faithful, Faintnot, Hopestill, Strong; Praise-G.o.d Barbone, one of Cromwell's followers, is said to have had two brothers, baptised with the Christian names of "Christ-came-into-the-world-to-save Barbone" and "If-Christ-had-not-died-thou-hadst-been-d.a.m.ned Barbone" respectively; but this is apocryphal, and so is probably the American counterpart: "Through-many-trials-and-tribulations-we-must-enter-into-the-kingdom-of-G.o.d"

(Acts 15 : 22) as a Christian name.